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Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.
Saul Bellow
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The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking?
Saul Bellow
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We are free to withdraw (to withdraw our minds where we cannot withdraw our bodies) from situations in which our humanity or lack of it is defined for us.
Saul Bellow
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In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.
Saul Bellow
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Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.
Saul Bellow
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It is sometimes necessary to repeat what we all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location, and avoid originality.
Saul Bellow
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I don't actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I'm beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.
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The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it — that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.
Saul Bellow
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Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing — a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U. N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized."
Saul Bellow
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Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.
Saul Bellow
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Much of junk culture has a core of crisis — shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.
Saul Bellow
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People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
Saul Bellow
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I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog.
Saul Bellow
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An era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.
Saul Bellow
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And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.
Saul Bellow
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Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces -- down to the last glassy splinter.
Saul Bellow
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The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.
Saul Bellow
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An utterly steady, reliable woman, responsible to the point of grimness. Daisy was a statistician for the Gallup Poll.
Saul Bellow
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The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.
Saul Bellow
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There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.
Saul Bellow
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To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.
Saul Bellow
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My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?
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The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred.
Saul Bellow
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One of the booby traps of freedom - which is bordered on all sides by isolation - is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.
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There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover.
Saul Bellow
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Saul Bellow
Born:
June 10, 1915
Died:
April 5, 2005
(aged 89)
Bio:
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts.
Known for:
The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
Herzog (1964)
Humboldt's Gift (1975)
Seize the Day (1956)
Henderson the Rain King (1959)
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